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But, soul reached, why need we look higher; why not make this
The First?
A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once
something other and something more powerful than Soul and that
the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is
certainly not true, as people imagine, that the soul, brought to
perfection, produces Intellect. How could that potentiality come
to actuality unless there be, first, an effective principle to
induce the actualization which, left to chance, might never
occur?
The Firsts must be supposed to exist in actuality, looking to
nothing else, self-complete. Anything incomplete must be sequent
upon these, and take its completion from the principles
engendering it which, like fathers, labour in the improvement of
an offspring born imperfect: the produced is a Matter to the
producing principle and is worked over by it into a shapely
perfection.
And if, further, soul is passible while something impassible
there must be or by the mere passage of time all wears away, here
too we are led to something above soul.
Again there must be something prior to Soul because Soul is in
the world and there must be something outside a world in which,
all being corporeal and material, nothing has enduring reality:
failing such a prior, neither man nor the Ideas would be eternal
or have true identity.
These and many other considerations establish the necessary
existence of an Intellectual-Principle prior to Soul.
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